Resource - High/scope In The Elementary Classroom

READY SCHooL ASSESSMENT
Teacher Supports; Effective Curricula;
Engaging Environments; Family,
School, and Community Partnerships;
Respecting Diversity; and Assessing
Progress. Each dimension has 11 to 21
indicators — policies and practices that
support and promote best practices of
ready schools. For example, another
trait on the NEgP’s list of ready school
characteristics is that “ready schools have
strong leadership” (Shore, 1998, p. 5).
in the Leaders and Leadership dimension
of the RSA, measurable aspects
of strong leadership are defined (e.g.,
whether or not the school principal has
academic training or classroom experience
in early childhood education).
The primary focus of the RSA is to
help elementary schools think critically
about their policies and practices. in particular,
users of the tool are challenged
to look at evidence to see how they are
and are not ready to educate all children.
The focus is not on whether or not children
are ready for school, nor is it on the
degree to which preschools conform to
the expectations of K–12 systems. The
goal of the RSA is to help forge a connection
between preschool and elementary
school that is grounded in early
childhood education best practice.
Data Analysis in Context
As with any initiative to improve a
program or school, responsible reform is
driven by data. More importantly, that
data must represent valid and reliable information
about the children, families,
teachers, and communities from which it
is drawn. in addition to achieving established
psychometric properties of validity
and reliability, the RSA helps ensure the
use of data that is a full reflection of the
specific circumstances and characteristics
of a school. it requires a process of group
evidence-gathering, analysis, and consensus
scoring. An RSA team consists
of representatives from the field of early
childhood, parents, community partners,
teachers, and school administrators. By
bringing together these varied points of
view, the RSA encourages the full inclusion
of data needed to comprehensively
evaluate the strengths and challenges of
a school’s policies and practices.
The online Ready School Profiler shows a school’s relative strength in each of the dimensions
and subdimensions of school readiness as measured by the RSA. Profile graphs show comparison
bars indicating how a school has scored relative to the average of a sample of schools that have
completed the RSA.
An essential part of comprehensive
measurement is to gather multiple types
of evidence from multiple sources. A
common way that policymakers and
parents evaluate whether or not an elementary
school is successful is by looking
at children’s test scores. Using child
outcomes as one measure of school performance
is a reasonable expectation.
The goal of the
RSA is to help
forge a connection
between preschool
and elementary
school that is
grounded in early
childhood education
best practice.
However, expecting children to flourish
in learning environments that are illequipped
to support them is not. The
degree to which there is continuity between
children’s early childhood and
elementary experiences can be viewed
as an important indicator of a successful
school. This type of understanding of
school accountability to include a preschool
to elementary continuum does
not exclude a role for child assessment
data — but it does encourage analysis
of that data in context. Just as best practice
encourages authentic assessment of
children’s full range of development, so
too is it important to understand schools
not just by sets of scores on tests, but by
information about the context in which
those scores were produced.
Putting a Plan in Place
Beyond gathering good data, there
must also be a plan in place for how that
data will be used to draw conclusions
about a school and how that analysis
will translate into school improvement
goals. A high-quality data-gathering
www.highscope.org ReSource Fall/Winter 2008 18